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Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has announced that he will be joining Everipedia, the team looking to build a blockchain-based encyclopaedia.
Dr. Sangor not only co-founded one of the web’s most widely used and well-know sites, he also has the honour of inventing the word ‘Wikipedia’. He has also served as editor-in-chief of Citizendium and has served as an adviser for other online encyclopaedia projects like Ballotpedia.
As such, he seems like the perfect brain to pick for the team looking to build a open-source wiki network that decentralises the knowledge base by “allowing every editor to become a stakeholder in the network”.
“Blockchain technology is making exciting new things possible. I’m delighted to join this team which is poised to innovate on the Wikipedia model just as Wikipedia innovated on the Britannica model almost two decades ago. In an era of misinformation, the world stands to benefit enormously from a transparent, immutable and decentralized protocol for accessing and sharing knowledge,” Dr. Sanger said.
“We’ll not only make Everipedia more comprehensive than Wikipedia; in my role, I’ll help create a neutral framework enabling the world to find the best encyclopaedia articles on every topic.”
Aligning incentives
The Everipedia project was started in 2015 as a way of using distributed ledger to incentivise content creators by allowing them to become stakeholders in the encyclopaedia network itself. With over 3 million unique monthly users and 6 million wiki articles, Everipedia already has more content than English Wikipedia.
“The Everipedia network provides a new paradigm change and knowledge economy to disrupt the old centralized Internet knowledge encyclopaedia model. We are creating this network using the cutting-edge technology of EOS.io software,” said Everipedia co-founder and CTO, Travis Moore.
The company uses an incentive structure based on a distributed backend hosted on a blockchain. Users are rewarded with tokens for curating articles, which are pegged to the value of the network. This means that people are active stakeholders in the project and benefit more from the health of the project.
The company wants to create an eceosystem that democratises the traditional encyclopaedia model while also effectively aligns the incentives of value creators and value extractors. If it is successful, this model will eliminate the need for donations or advertising.
“We’re thrilled to have Dr. Sanger on board as we roll out the world’s first decentralized encyclopaedia that empowers users in a whole new way,” said Everipedia co-founder and CEO, Theodor Forselius.
“With his added expertise, we look forward to amplifying Everipedia’s rapid growth and reputation as a reliable source of information by and for the people.”
